Month: July 2010

David Brooks shares his view:

My view is data based. The international evidence shows that if you want to balance the budget, something like 66 percent to 80 percent of your effort should go into cutting spending and something like a third to a fifth should consist of tax increases. If you rely on tax increases too much, you end up messing up the incentives for people who save and invest. Also spending cuts on entitlement programs have been the most enduring way to change long term fiscal trends. Cuts in other spending are too trivial to make a difference and don’t last because politicians reverse themselves.

Agreed on all counts. But can the GOP accept even this degree of compromise? And could Obama bring Pelosi along? It seems to me that next year will be the acid test of "Goodbye To All That." If wrecking America's finances was Bush's legacy, restoring them should be Obama's.

It seems to me simply wrong to ascribe the bile of flocks of angry commenters that appear on any site that tackles contentious topics to the blogger himself. You can criticize him or her for not deleting them and providing a platform to hate (Ann Althouse's readers routinely mock me for having HIV, for example, and she does nothing) but you can't criticize someone for attracting such creatures on the internet – let alone convict him of the same views. To further convict him on the basis of anti-Semitic emails sent entirely independently of him to a third party – and to describe them as "Stephen Walt's Mailbag" when in fact, it's Jeffrey Goldberg's in-tray – strikes me as deeply unfair. But that's what my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has done with Stephen Walt in his latest post. He has every right to lambaste Walt for things he writes and has written (although I think "Jew-baiter" is an ugly and absurd excess) – but this guilt-by-association is perverse. As Walt notes,

If we judge bloggers not by what they write but by what some of their readers write in response, we would be giving opponents of those bloggers an easy way to discredit them. If you don't like what a particular blogger says, write an anonymous comment praising him or her, add some bigoted statements of your own, and then send Smith an anonymous email and tell him to check out the comments thread. Voila!

It also violates a core Internet etiquette – and seems remarkably defensive – not to link to a post you criticize. 

And if raising questions about Israel's policies inflames anti-Semitism (and how can it not among the fever swamps of hate out there?), should that therefore prevent us from airing such questions? The chilling implications of this kind of argument are profound – and inimical to free discourse. Look: I know it's awful to read bigoted emails. And relatively new bloggers may be unused to the routine bile. But you need to accept it as part of a new media with no filters. 

Powerline, comparing Breitbart to Buckley!:

With the hounds baying, Andrew deserves the support of conservatives in his struggle with the Democrat-Media complex.

Yes, they're that insane. Limbaugh goes after Shep Smith for using basic journalistic ethics, and repeats the Big Race-Baiting Lie:

“This regime is tribalizing this country. They are dividing this country. It's not just enough to say that they are dividing us. They are tribalizing this country. We aren't Americans anymore. We're all members of different racial tribes, and we are to be pitted against each other: Black Americans, White Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans. We're all being divided up racially, by tribes.”

The pure projection is staggering. Breitbart won't apologize and the amoral pageview machine Politico puffs him up. I suspect the small, sudden moment of some ethics and honesty on the right scared the bullies.

A reader writes:

Although I agree that you have every right to be suspicious, I suggest you change tack on the Trig stuff and just keep publicizing the story exactly as Palin presents it. Because I think the facts of the story as she presents them show her in even worse light than if it were proved that Trig was not hers.

From what I’ve read the facts as she presents them show her to be either monumentally stupid, monumentally hubristic, or monumentally cavalier with another person’s life. Why, it’s almost as if she didn’t want her special needs child to be born safely.  Anyone who has ever had a child, knows someone who’s had a child or is part of the medical profession (which I would imagine covers a fairly significant proportion of the electorate) would, if they fully knew the story Palin herself recounts, either think that she was acting in a grossly irresponsible, dangerous way or else being in some way ‘economical with the truth’.  All the other women I’ve talked to who’ve been through labor and birth are far more shocked by her version of events than by the notion that she may have adopted her own grandchild.

The reason Palin hasn’t made more of a song and dance about the Trig stuff is that every version of the story reflects incredibly badly on her.

A reader writes:

Here’s what I find most ironic about Palin’s staunch opposition to the Cordoba House: there are already at least 10 mosques in Manhattan, including Masjid Manhattan, which has been a mere 4 blocks from Ground Zero since 1970.  Palin is worried about Muslims taking over area near the Ground Zero site even though they’ve been there for decades.

Chris Cillizza points to a major hurdle for her in the first primary:

New Hampshire has an open primary system, meaning that independents can choose to vote in either the Democratic or Republican primary for president. … With Obama almost certain not to be challenged for his party's nomination in 2012, independents are likely to play a very influential role in determining the Republican nominee. Palin has struggled mightily to court independent voters since the 2008 campaign; a recent Quinnipiac University national poll showed just 33 percent of independents viewed her favorably, while 50 percent saw her in an unfavorable light.

But Romney is next door and gives her an alibi. It's way too early to game this, but I see no real impediments to her taking over the party completely. She already has, in so many ways.

I love Dish readers:

A reader writes:

If you read the fine print under the graph (which you can only find on the original post you linked to, but not on your own post,) you see that the incomes represented are post-tax. In 1979, the highest marginal tax rates were 70%, double the current 35% rate. Looking at pre-tax income, you'd see a much flatter curve. More importantly though, at 70% marginal tax rates, there's a huge incentive for high-income earners to utilize tax-avoidance strategies, or just plain defer their cash income to a later date. Talk to any tax planner who's been around for a while, and I'm sure they'll tell you that there were a lot more tax loopholes back in 1979 than there are now. In fact, one of the main goals of Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986 was to close many of these loopholes.

Look, I think that income inequality is a big issue that needs to be addressed, but that chart is comparing apples to oranges. The chart doesn't prove that income inequality is increasing; rather, it proves that higher taxes mean lower post-tax income.

Sedona, Arizona, 4.07 pm

I'm stretching things a bit, I know, but it's interesting to see Ross praise what he calls David Cameron's "pro-family" impulses – especially by supporting married couples in the tax code, something I also support. The Lib-Dems have largely quashed this for now. But Cameron's pro-family agenda specifically and emphatically included gay couples. In fact, his entire argument was that we should not distinguish between gay and straight, but focus on core values – like commitment and responsibility. This is the argument I've been making for twenty years – and is directly opposed to the Republican Christianism which seeks to support family life by discriminating against and, in some states, seeking to recriminalize gay relationships.

So does Ross back, like David Brooks, Cameron's approach? Or the position of Robbie George, Maggie Gallagher, et al? Or is his evasion of this to continue?